Daan Hendriks - Sound Design & Music Production

Back Breaker Vengeance Teaser Trailer

HWS_BASIC — Sun, 29 May 2011 17:46:46 +0000

Sound design + mix for Back Breaker Vengeance (XBLA/PSN) by Natural Motion

Moshi Monsters Super Moshis trailer

Daan — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 19:54:07 +0000

I am very proud to announce I have been working on the awesome Super Moshis trailer for the hugely popular online game and virtual world Moshi Monsters. Moshi Monsters is developed by Mind Candy, and it’s a virtual world where anyone can adopt and care for their own pet monster. The game has seen an explosion of growth since its launch 2 years ago, and currently counts over 27 million subscribers! Yes, that is, in pure subscription numbers, almost 3 times the size of World of Warcraft…

I had great fun working on this trailer, as I immediately loved the art direction and character design. So let’s hope the kids love the result as much as I loved working on it :)

I did all sound design, the music editing and the mix.
Some of the moshi monster voices were kindly provided to me by Mind Candy, and I edited those sounds to match the on-screen action. Other characters did not have any audio for their vocalisations yet so I created those myself.
Royalty free music was licenced by stockmusic.net.

Other credits:
Director/Animator – Wip Vernooij
Animator – Cako Facioli

Interview about getting into the industry

Daan — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 20:06:47 +0000

I was interviewed by career advice site Yournxtstep about my background and experiences as freelance sound designer. Their website is aimed on helping teenagers decide what career choice to make, and give insight into what certain jobs exactly entail.

If you’re interested, you can read the interview here:

Interview with Daan Hendriks, Sound Designer/Music Producer

Introduction

My name is Daan Hendriks, I am a 29 years old Dutch sound designer/music producer at Audiomotif, which is a company I started together with Durk Kooistra. I am also a founding member of Humanworkshop, which is a netlabel and audio blog. Durk is part of Humanworkshop too.

What do you do?

The main thing I do is sound design for video games. For whoever is not really sure what this means, let me give a simple description of the job. On the most basic level, this means that I create sound effects that will be used in the game. Any type of audio that is not music or dialogue will be created and implemented by the sound designer. For instance, gun shots, explosions, menu sounds, environmental audio, vehicle engines, monster growls, and so on.

I also occasionally create music for various sorts of media, mainly electronic music to promotion videos and the likes.

How did you get to the position you find yourself in?

I studied Audio Design at Uni in the Netherlands, where I am from. After I finished and was awarded a Bachelors Degree in Arts and Technology, I spent a couple of years producing music and releasing it under my own label, Humanworkshop. I then decided to move to the UK to try my luck and find work here in the games industry as a sound designer.

I started out as a games tester, and from there I managed to get my first audio gig, which was editing and processing lines of dialogue. By doing this type of work for about a year, I got to know more people in the industry, and eventually this lead to several sound design projects. It may sound simple, but by just working hard and always trying to deliver the best I could, the amount of work gradually increased. I basically rolled into being a freelance sound designer this way. As I got busier and busier, I decided to team up with my very talented friend Durk to start Audiomotif, with the basic idea that two people can do more (work) than one.

Why did you choose this profession?

For me there was never anything that I really considered doing instead of this. From a young age I had always been very busy with music technology, and combined with my love for video games, the two of them eventually simply ‘clicked’ in my mind.

What are the good/bad points of the job?

I simply love what I do. In my job, you get to create noise all day – who wouldn’t like that? It is creatively challenging and satisfying work.

It can be tough at times, especially when there is not much information given by the client about what they want and need. It can be hard for people to talk about sound, to explain what they want from it, or how they imagine it – it is a very abstract thing indeed. So I always have to make sure I communicate properly with my clients in order for everybody to understand where we are heading and what needs to be done. When you work in audio, you often find yourself in a situation where a client has started to think at a pretty late stage about what they want in terms of audio. This then results in deadlines being very tight. Generally, you have to juggle a lot with your time and be pretty flexible to keep everybody happy – yourself included :)

Were you ever discouraged by friends, family or employers when trying to get into this industry?

I have never been discouraged, but my parents have always challenged me to think about and explain why I want certain things. When I was about 14, they were a bit sceptical about my desire of a career in music/sound, and rightly so. But they never made me think it was a foolish idea. They simply pushed me to really be aware of what I was trying to do. As soon as they started to see I was really serious about it, they supported me in any way they could. So I am definitely very lucky in that respect.

However, on a generic scale, it can be discouraging when you try to get into this industry. There are a lot of people out there who have the same idea, and there’s not nearly enough work to accommodate all of them. The best thing you can do is just keep on trying and trying, never stop learning, and to stay positive.

Have you sacrificed anything or taken any risks to get where you are?

For me it was a great decision to move to another country (the UK). It gave me exactly the sort of boost I needed. When you move into a new country knowing hardly anybody, and not having a job or even a half decent place to live at the start of it all, you force yourself to focus and work step by step towards your goals. When I was still in the Netherlands, I was always trying hard but I was a bit messy, and so I wasn’t progressing as fast as I wanted to.

Who inspires you/is a personal hero?

Thanks to the internet, I am pretty much overloaded with inspiring information and people. I am mainly thinking about excellent audio design / music technology blogs like The Music of Sound, Create Digital Music, and Designing Sound. And then there are all the great new games that are coming out, many of which with truly fantastic audio. Too name all the good ones would be too much, but some personal favourites are Flower and Uncharted 2: Amongst Thieves. There is really so much great work out there!

If you were to hire someone, what would you look for in a potential employee?

If I was looking to hire someone, I would always first look in my own circle of audio professionals that I know. This is the harsh reality I am afraid, a lot of the jobs that go around in this line of work, are passed along between people who know each other. This is not because there is some evil Old Boys network in place; it actually makes a lot of sense. It is hugely important to work with people that you know you can trust. Talent is one thing, but experience is another.

That being said, this does not mean it is impossible to get your foot in the door when you don’t yet know the right people and have all the necessary experience. To build up experience (and thus expand your network), it helps a great deal to get involved with projects that don’t necessarily pay (a lot of) money. For instance, there is a really large community of enthusiastic people that create mods of commercially released videogames. These are essentially people who team up to create a game by using the tools and engine of an official game. Getting involved with mods is a great starting point for someone who wants to make sound effects and/or music for games. Have a look at http://www.moddb.com/ to find plenty of mod teams who are in need of good audio people.

If I were to hire someone I’d never met before, I would look at how hard they have already been trying. Have you done any relevant projects in your free time while you were working as a pizza delivery boy to make ends meet? Have you created a portfolio of your work, maybe by using video material from movies, stripping out all the audio, and recreating the scenes with your own work? I would always look at how badly someone wants it, and how far they’ve went to get it (not by walking over other people though, of course!). Have they been trying to train themselves the best they could, do they display a ‘can do’ mentality without being arrogant or unrealistic? These would be the kind of questions I’d try to find the answers to.

If you had a magic wand, what would be the one thing you would change about your industry?

This is a complaint that is regularly voiced by audio people in both the games and movie industries: sound design is often being a bit overlooked by the people in charge (videogame producers, movie directors, and the like). There is a danger for a sound designer to be regarded as a technical person who ‘pushes some magic buttons’, whereas in fact this line of work is hugely creative, and contributes enormously to how a game or film is being experienced. If I had this magic wand, I would make those people in charge aware of the importance of audio, to ensure it gets the attention, scheduling and budgeting it needs.

Do you have a closing message for anyone interested in you line of work?

If you want to get into this line of work, you have to be aware there is going to be a lot of competition from people who have the same idea. But one aspect of this reality is very important: the audio community at large, both professionals and amateurs, are an exceptionally open bunch of people, who are more than happy to share their experiences and knowledge.

In other words, your ‘competition’ is also your greatest source of information, and making contacts and friendships with other audio people is an assured way of learning what you want to learn, and eventually getting into the professional side of things. I sometimes hear stories from friends who work in graphic design and video editing, and it seems like the situation is quite different there – often, it seems, people don’t like to share their specific knowledge or techniques, and try to fence themselves off from ‘The Competition’. Of course this is a very generalising statement, but one thing is for sure: this is most definitely not the case with the audio community.

And, how would they look to get involved?

The best way to start is to regularly read certain blogs that I already mentioned before, like Designing Sound, The Music of Sound, and Create Digital Music. Also, sign up to a sound design mailing list, like the Yahoo sound design group, and visit and post on forums such as the Game Audio Forum.

Creating a monster with Creatures by Boom Library

Daan — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 09:56:31 +0000

In this post, I want to show a little sound design demo I have done utilising material from the awesome new Boom Library release, Creatures. I was a beta tester for this library. As the name of the library suggests, it’s intended to create Creature vox with, and that’s exactly what I’ve done.

The purpose of this demo is to show how important it is to work with high resolution audio, and also to share a few tricks that I have learned with regards to vox processing. One of the great things of the Boom Library products is that they’re all recorded in pristine quality at high sample rate and bit depth (192kHz/24 bit), and made available at 96kHz/24 bit. This means that for a sound designer, there’s a lot of possibilities to tweak their material, as the high resolution audio means you can pitch and process until the extremes whilst still keeping good quality sound. Conversely, if the same source samples were provided at ‘standard’ or CD quality (44.1kHz/16 bit), you wouldn’t be able to do the amount of extreme pitch shifting shown in this demo without a significant quality loss.

So, basically this demo is going to explain how to get from this:

AngryBeast 01 Source by Daan Hendriks

to this:

AngryBeast 01 by Daan Hendriks

Have a listen to the sound files in the player below. They demo all the stages of processing and editing that I have taken the original source files through in order to get to the final result. Note that everything has been created using only the original 4 source files: no extra sounds have been added in the mix.

Boom Library – Creatures – Sound design demo by Daan Hendriks

1 – Selecting the source files
I selected 4 sounds of a man growling from the Creatures library. Although the Creatures library comes with a lot of other sounds, plenty of them much more creature-like, I wanted to use dry and human-sounding source for the purpose of this demo.

2 – Pitch shifting -24 semitones
The first and important process… Pitch shifting the whole lot down to -24 semitones. One can immediately hear what we’re aiming for now… A big dirty monster! Here the beauty of high resolution audio can be clearly heard, as after the pitch shifting good quality sound file is retained, not a muddy file without any high frequency content.

I also applied some dynamics (limiting) and slight convolution reverb and flanging at this stage.

3 – Apply reverse reverb
An old but still nice trick… The idea is: reverse your sound, apply reverb, record the output, and reverse that recording once again. You end up with a sound that has a kind of ‘incoming’ or fade-in effect to it, and often works well for horror voices.

4 – EQ, edit and fade the reverse reverb files
Applied some simple EQ, editing and fading to make the sounds shorter and less bassy.

5 – Create growly layer
I now created a ‘growly layer’ to add low end and body by taking the originally pitched down version (the one from step 2) and applying some edits and FX (chorus, delay and modulation for widening the sound, mixed with a bit of upwards pitch shifting, and dynamics processing)

6 – Create raspy layer
My next decision was to add a raspy, aggressive sounding layer, to make it all sound more forward and in your face. I did this by again taking the original pitched down file, and applying various stages of fx and editing. First I used an EQ to take out the low end body of this layer so that it wouldn’t interfere with the growl layer. Then I added saturation/distortion to make this layer more aggressive sounding. The next stage was a similar approach to chorus/delay/pitch-shift to widen the sound, and another EQ to top off some of the high frequency content created by all these various stages of processing.

7 – Create whisper layer
To give the overall sound a bit more slimy and dirty character, I made another layer that I call the whisper layer as it’s more present in the upper-mid and higher part of the audio spectrum. The approach for this layer was to take a vocoder, and use its internal noise generator to mix noise with the original signal, creating an ‘airy’ sound.

8 – Create a short snappy layer
At this stage, I recorded all above 4 layers mixed together, and pitch shifted the resulting recording. My aim for this was to create a subtle amount of extra character to the overall sound, intending to make it a bit more ‘snappy’.

9 – The final stage: mixing and processing all 5 layers
For the final stage, I made a volume balance between the 5 layers that I had now created. Then I applied various stages of stereo width modulation, in order to make the creature sound big and vicious but not ‘unrealistic’ at the same time (yes, ironic…). I also applied more EQ and dynamics processing, plus an exciter to add more harmonics and make the overall sound richer.

Screenshot detailing how I layered the sounds…

Fireworks recordings

Daan — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 10:34:55 +0000

Last week it was Guy Fawkes night here in the UK, which is basically just an excuse for people to get drunk and light fireworks. I took a microphone and recorder to a fireworks display nearby where I live to try and get some recordings.

The main challenge was how to avoid people. I pretty much walked around the display area for a while until I found a fairly quiet spot where only a number of onlookers were. The great thing about this spot was that it was right between various tall buildings, so as soon as the fireworks started this created all sorts of great echos and reverbs.

I know, a very crappy picture of the recording setup… I later moved everything some meters backwards to get a better recording perspective

Apart from my main recording setup for the night (Rode NT4 stereo mic + Tascam DR680 recorder) I had also brought a Zoom H2, and its 4 channel surround recording feature came in handy with capturing all the echos and reverbs happening behind me. As Soundcloud can of course not playback 4 channel surround files, I’ll just share a montage of what I recorded with the NT4:

Fireworks – montage

As Soundcloud was being a total ar$3 not letting me upload files, I had to use this player

One thing is immediately clear, there’s not much low end to these recordings. It’s probably because I was fairly close to the display (approx 20-30 meters from where the fireworks were lit). Being so close must be why the low frequency energy that was certainly present on-site is not captured in the recording, as due to the length of the low frequency sound waves they would’ve been more apparent if I’d recorded them from a further distance. So that’s a lesson for next time.

To make up for the lack of low end content, I applied a few quick and dirty processes to some of the recorded material to creature some nice booms and explosions:

Fireworks – sonic booms

As Soundcloud was being a total ar$3 not letting me upload files, I had to use this player

This is more how it actually looked like, but I ripped this off Google…

I’m a gearslut…

HWS_BASIC — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 16:48:37 +0000

I couldn’t resist myself when I saw an Ebay auction for a Neumann RSM 191 A-S microphone + Rycote windshield, I just had to go ahead and win it! This is supposed to be a fantastic sounding mic, and looking at the new price (around £3500) you’d most certainly expect so! Luckily I got it for less than that, but still a sizeable chunk of money nonetheless.

This mic should be a great addition to my fast growing recording arsenal though, lots of sfx recordists swear by it. I cannot wait to start using it, and I’m sure I will be posting recordings here made with it in the upcoming weeks and months. Speaking of, if I feel like it I’ll probably post some recordings of a fireworks display, made a couple of days ago.

So this purchase brings my current location recording equipment list to the following:
Tascam DR680 8 track recorder
Zoom H2 recorder
Røde NTG-3 shotgun microphone
2x Hydrophones by Jez Riley French
2x Telephone pickup coils for recording electromagnetic signals
2x Contact microphones by Jez Riley French
Røde NT1a/NT2a microphones, altho I don’t really take these out into the field
Røde NT4 stereo microphone
Røde Blimp windshield kit
…and a Neumann RSM 191 A-S stereo MS/XY shotgun microphone + Rycote windshield kit (woot!!)

This equipment list has been growing fast and steadily over the last few months… I may sell a mic or two eventually though depending on how things fare with the 191.

Next up: a set of DPA 4060 miniature mics, I would think!

The 191 I purchased in its flightcase + rycote windshield kit … *drool* …

191 detail shot… *more drool* …

Pumps, engines and tesla coils…

HWS_BASIC — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 00:56:08 +0000

Today I went to the Cambridge Museum of Technology to record some tesla coils. I found this website in my search for UK tesla coil builders, and noticed that they had a public event coming up in this very museum. As I’ve been wanting to capture high voltage sounds for a while now, this was a great opportunity to give it a go.

However the irony was that, although I got some nice recordings of loud and vicious tesla coils, the museum itself had some unexpected gems – a great selection of old fashioned steam, oil and gas engines in all sizes, all of which produced a large variety of sounds. I will definitely have to come back to this museum one day when it’s not so busy and bring multiple microphones to capture these glorious old machines in full perspective!

Small Steam Pump/Engine

Small Steam Pump Engine – Perspective 01 by Daan Hendriks

Small Steam Pump Engine – Perspective 02 by Daan Hendriks

Small Steam Pump Engine – Perspective 03 by Daan Hendriks

Small Steam Pump Engine – Perspective 04 by Daan Hendriks

Medium Sized Oil Engine

Old Fashioned Oil Engine by Daan Hendriks

Rag and Chain Hand Pump

Squeaky Rattly Hand Pump by Daan Hendriks

Huge Gas Engine

Huge Gas Engine Shutdown by Daan Hendriks

Tesla Coil.
This picture was made by Haydn Payne, who was also at the event to make sound recordings. I heard some of his results and they sound great, as they were tracked in stereo using a MKH30/60 M/S setup. I need me a figure of 8 mic next!

Tesla Coil arcing noise by Daan Hendriks

Tesla Coil Single Burst by Daan Hendriks

Tesla tonal by Daan Hendriks

All sounds recorded with a Rode NTG-3 shotgun into Tascam DR680 recorder at 96 kHz/24 bit

Hydrophones – beginner experiments…

HWS_BASIC — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 18:50:14 +0000

Today, I made a little trip to the beach. It’s a couple of minutes from my flat so that was easy enough. Earlier in the morning I had received two hydrophones in the post that I ordered from Jez riley French, and I was eager to try them out.

I’ve never owned or used hydrophones before, so this was all purely an experiment. I pretty much plugged the two of them into the pebbles, spaced approx a meter and a half apart, rolled back the cable towards the recorder, and hit record, whilst adjusting the levels. I clearly need some practice with all of this – these cables are 10 meters each and I was fiddling about quite a lot before I had them untied.

When I was finally ready to record, I noticed there was some sort of buzzing tone or interference in the signal which I couldn’t directly locate – and I didn’t feel like getting my shoes off again to go back into the cold British sea’s water and mess with the hydrophones to see if it had any effect. I decided to just let the recording roll.

As it turned out, the first recordings I did were not great. Besides, I learned a valuable lesson – sounds from the environment outside of the water can still find their way into an underwater recording. There were some seagulls squeaking and a group of people sat themselves down about 10 meters from me during the recording, talking loudly. All of this was picked up by the hydrophones, I guess due to the sound waves travelling through the water and thus reaching the mics.

Hydrophones @ the beach – Waves, cable interference and a gull… by Daan Hendriks

I then made my way to another, quieter part of the beach.
Here I got a some fairly nice recordings of pebbles being moved around by the water, and sea waves rolling over the microphones. I simultaneously recorded with the Rode NT4 stereo mic in order to get a fuller, larger sound.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with these new toys, and am looking forward to experiment more and get to grips with how to best utilise these kind of mics. Soon I should try and put one of them in block of ice, in hopes of getting a nice recording of thawing…

Hydrophones @ the beach – Pebble Movement 01 by Daan Hendriks

Hydrophones @ the beach – Pebble Movement 02 by Daan Hendriks

Hydrophones – Pebble Movement 03 – right channel distorted by Daan Hendriks

Hydrophones @ the beach – Waves by Daan Hendriks

Hydrophones @ the beach – Waves – hydros + stereo mic by Daan Hendriks

Dead Space Ignition

HWS_BASIC — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 11:23:41 +0000

I’m happy to announce that I have been working on Dead Space Ignition this summer. Dead Space Ignition is a prequel to the highly anticipated Dead Space 2, and is released for PS3 and Xbox 360 through PSN and XBLA. It’s basically a collection of minigames with animated comics in between, that tell the story of the events leading up the the start of Dead Space 2.

I created all in-game sound effects for this game, apart from a few sounds that were taken from the original Dead Space. Also, I’ve worked on about half of the game’s animated comics: editing the music, dialogue and sound effects (using a library of Dead Space legacy sounds for creatures and weapons, and adding my own sound design where needed), and mixing all elements to create the finalised sound tracks.

The Audio Guys hired me for this project. The game is developed by Sumo Digital and published by EA.

Although there’s a fair amount of reviews online for this game, so far I’ve only found one that comments on the sound (well there’s other reviews where the dialogue is mentioned, but I wasn’t involved in the recording of that):

“Sound: 8.
[...] the sound effects are good.” IGN

DJ Sets – Afrobeat

HWS_BASIC — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 14:07:21 +0000

Tracklisting:

1. Antibalas – Battle of the Species
2. Seun Kuti – Many Things
3. Tony Allen – Afro-Disco Beat
4. Gabo Brown & Orchestre Poly-Rythmo – It’s A Vanity
5. Antibalas – Filibuster X
6. Fela Kuti – Zombie
7. Chico Mann – Dilo Como Yo
8. Akoya Afrobeat Ensemble – U.S.A.
9. Tidiani Koné & Orchestre Poly-Rythmo – Djanfa Magni
10. The Sweet Talks – Eyi Su Ngaangaa
11. Sir Shina Peters & His International Stars – Yabis
12. Vincent Ahehehinnou – Ou C’est Lui Ou C’est Moi
13. Chico Mann – Who You Runnin’ From
14. The Budos Band – Adenji
15. The 3rd Generation Band – Because of Money
16. The Budos Band – Chicago Falcon
17. DJ Krush – Kemuri
18. Fela Kuti – Expensive Shit
19. Antibalas – Government Magic
20. The Afromotive – Yako
21. Akoya Afrobeat Ensemble – Fela Dey
22. Antibalas – War Hero
23. Fela Kuti – Roforofo Fight
24. Antibalas – Talkatif
25. Akoya Afrobeat Ensemble – B.F.B.F. (Panama)
26. Antibalas – Dirt and Blood
27. The Afromotive – Scare Tactics
28. Fela Kuti – Lady
29. Bola Johnson – Lagos Special
30. The Ogyatanaa Show Band – Disco Africa
31. Chico Mann – Say What
32. Marijata – No Condition is Permanent
33. Mike Dogliotti – Don Pascual

Have a listen

Lenthy Afro Set for Lidia

A pretty explosive mix of my favourite afrobeat tunes, recorded one early Saturday morning in a slightly lubricated state. This one lasts about 2,5 hours! Yes I was having fun.

Download it now